fifty years three hundred had gone to rest there.

There were no religious exercises at the funerals, neither singing,
praying, preaching, or reading of the scriptures. This was by way of
revolt from former superstitious practices. The friends gathered,
condoled with the afflicted ones, sat around a while and then the corpse
was taken to the burying ground. After that the party returned to the
house of the deceased, where much eating and drinking was indulged in,
and if the weather permitted, outdoor games and horse races were in
order. The next Sabbath an appropriate funeral sermon was preached. A
bereaved husband or wife usually soon married again.

The meeting house was never heated, but the people, summoned by drum
beat, attended it every Sabbath, morning and afternoon, even in the
severest weather, although no Sabbath day house was erected here until
1745.

The sacramental bread often froze upon the communion plate, as did the
ink in the minister's study. The people worked their minister very hard,
as was the case in all early New England communities. They went to
church not so much because they had to as because they wanted to.
Church-going was their principal recreation. They demanded long prayers
and two long sermons each Sabbath from their minister, usually on
doctrinal points, which they acutely criticised. Services began at nine
o'clock in the forenoon, and continued until five in the afternoon with
an hour's intermission. Soldiers, fully armed, were always in attendance
throughout the services ready to repel any attack upon the settlement.

It should be added, however, that with all their strictness in Sabbath
keeping and catechising, in family and church discipline, there was
great license in those days in speech and manner, much hard drinking,
and rude merrymaking, due to their rough form of living. They were not
what they wanted to be, nor what a loyal posterity perhaps longs to
believe them. They had red blood in their veins. They were among the
most enterprising men of their generation. They were backwoodsmen, the
vanguard of that wonderful race which in two hundred years pushed
westward the frontier from this place to the Pacific, fighting with man
and beast the whole way, and sowed the land with vigorous sons and
daughters.

The congregational singing in those days must have been an interesting
performance. When the first settlers came to New England from the old
country, they brought with them a